As usual or entirely different? Playing with foreignness in the original and French translation of the novel „Jak zawsze” („As Usual”) by Zygmunt Miłoszewski

Abstract

The present article constitutes an attempt to describe the specificity of the French translation of Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s novel Jak zawsze (As Usual), in which an important role is played by French, omnipresent in the text. The writer creates an alternative vision of Poland, where French almost becomes the second language, thus introducing French vocabulary in everyday life, its influence on Polish, and many neologisms proposed by the author. The translator Kamil Barbarski had to face a difficult task of preserving the indications of foreignness from the original without transgressing simultaneously, which seemed inevitable in the French translation. The article presents the translator’s strategies and constitutes a reflection upon the amount of foreignness in the original and the translated texts.